iPad Mini Teardown Reveals Samsung Display Driver, A5 Chip, Stereo Speakers

[lianlua]

Nope, I read the whole thing. That part doesn't make me disagree any less with the part I quoted before.

You're not identifying the nature of your disagreement.

In terms of being able to reproduce a stereo source without loss of audio information, the iPad has always had that capacity. This is unlike true mono playback devices, which play back the main (usually left in most encoding formats) channel only. Whether the two speakers in the iPad are split by channel, frequency, or are just duplicative for volume only was an open and unanswered question that was specifically articulated in the post you responded to.

You said:

I said the old ones had two speakers that were fed a summed mono signal, probably split into higher and lower frequencies by a crossover. Or possibly the exact same signal sent to both speakers.

There's no disagreement there. You are describing the exact situation that I am: a "summed mono signal" is a stereo signal being reproduced in a non-stereo arrangement. Hence the quotes in the original post, to denote the lack of actual stereo output. Two speakers and a stereo audio source are necessary but not sufficient conditions for stereo sound output.

Even if the two speakers are divided into a dedicated left channel speaker and a right channel speaker, it's irrelevant because the current 10" iPads can never have true stereo imaging, as there is no meaningful separation between the speakers. As previously mentioned, I would argue that the same is true of the iPad mini because while they are much further apart than the bigger iPads and are confirmed by Schiller to be dedicated to their own channels, they still lack sufficient separation to be described as stereo.